Last week, my truck broke down. A small thing, a mechanical failure, but its consequences rippled outward like falling dominoes. My parents stepped in to handle repairs, my brother lent me his car, and in turn, he borrowed my mother’s Jeep to get to work. The simple act of asking for and accepting help felt heavier than the engine itself. I’m not good at asking, admitting, or yielding. I am far more comfortable as the helper, the one who carries. But when my truck gave out, it forced me to occupy a space I often resist: dependence.
When I think about this past week now, I think of Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940). A lone attendant stands at the edge of dusk, tending to a small, isolated station. Behind him stretches a darkening forest, before him the long road fading into night. The painting is suspended in the spaces between. Between day and night, civilization and wilderness, movement and stillness. The gas station itself is a threshold, a place meant not for dwelling but for transition. Travelers stop, refuel, and move on. Yet Hopper arrests that fleeting moment of pause and makes it the subject.
Like the man at the pumps, I found myself in a kind of in-between. Between control and surrender, independence and the recognition that we do not — cannot — move through this life alone. The discomfort I felt in accepting help wasn’t just practical; it was existential. To need is to be human, but to accept that need touches something deep in the ego. Psychologically, it exposes the tension between autonomy and relatedness, two core drives that define our sense of self. We long to be self-sufficient, yet our survival and meaning depend on our bonds with others.
Thomas Merton captures this truth in No Man Is an Island:
“We are not meant to remain children forever, to be dependent forever on others, to be dominated by our own needs. We must begin to live for others.”
Merton’s phrasing often surprises readers: to live for others sounds like service, but it is also a call to humility. True independence, for him, is not separation but communion. It is a maturity that recognizes the self’s embeddedness in a network of love and obligation. The illusion of self-reliance, he warns, is spiritual poverty:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.”
That line reshapes how I now see my family’s acts of care. Their willingness to rearrange their own routines was not an intrusion into my autonomy, but an extension of love’s natural order. It's the gas that keeps the engine of connection running. To deny that help would have been, in Merton’s sense, to deny love itself.
Hopper’s attendant, alone in the waning light, is not entirely isolated. His lighted pumps glow red against the encroaching forest. The station a fragile outpost of civilization, of mutual service. Each traveler who stops there participates in a quiet ritual of exchange: need met by provision, motion made possible by pause. The station is liminal, yes, but also relational. Its entire purpose is to give and receive.
Perhaps that is what I am learning. Im learning that dependence is not the opposite of strength but its foundation. That the space between breakdown and movement, isolation and communion, is where grace most often lives. The road does not stretch endlessly on its own; it is made up of a series of stops, small stations of care, each lit briefly before the traveler moves on.
As Merton reminds us, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We belong to one another, even, and perhaps especially, when the engine fails.